When the show ended, we were told that there was a change in plans for the rest of the tour. Originally, we were scheduled to take the bus to Innsbruck, Austria, for a show and then fly to a sold-out event in Istanbul that was going to gross over a million dollars. But there had been a massive volcano eruption in Iceland that had blown so much ash into the air, flying was now impossible.
This was a potential disaster for the WWE as, with the SmackDown crew in Europe and the Raw crew in Ireland, there wasn’t enough talent stateside to do Monday’s show from New Jersey. Since the Raw guys were stuck on the island of Ireland, they couldn’t drive to a different airspace and were virtually trapped until the planes could take off. The last airport in all of Europe where planes were still flying out was in Madrid and since we were in mainland Europe, it was decided that the SmackDown crew would drive the 1,662 kilometers (1,033 miles for the metrically challenged) to Spain and fly to New Jersey from there to do Raw. Our last two shows were canceled because we had to leave immediately to make it to Madrid by ten forty-five P.M. the next evening, the absolute latest we could take off to beat the oncoming volcanic ash cloud.
I was choked that we had to leave because I had planned a snowboarding trip in Innsbruck for the day with John Morrison, but my hopes to ski the Alps were dashed. So I was already in a pissy mood when I boarded the bus at eleven P.M. and prepared for the eighteen-hour drive, but at least I was traveling on a luxury liner with plenty to eat and movies to watch. There were far worse ways to travel, I thought to myself as I reclined my overstuffed comfy chair and drifted off to sleep.
I felt the bus grind to a halt and opened my eyes to find that we’d only been driving for three hours and were barely in Geneva. Due to the abrupt change in plans, our current bus couldn’t leave Switzerland, so we had to switch to a new bus that would take us the rest of the way to Madrid.
Standing on the street, I noticed our new bus was a fair bit smaller than the old one and realized there was no way everyone was going to fit. I called John Laurinaitis to tell him this wasn’t going to work, especially considering we were going to be on the road for another fifteen hours.
“It was our only option, Chris. Because of the volcano, everything else was booked up. We tried to get a helicopter, limousines, even rental cars, but everything was taken and all we could get was that bus in Geneva.”
I reiterated that the new bus was simply too small and there was no way everybody was going to fit. Johnny said to squeeze in as many as we could and mentioned we had hotel rooms waiting for us to relax in once we arrived in Madrid.
“Sounds great. But we have to make it to Madrid first,” I said, and hung up the phone.
Kane overheard me talking to Johnny and asked what was going on.
“I told John there’s no way we can fit on this bus,” I said, nodding at the medium-size coach. Kane looked at me quizzically and said, “That’s not our new bus . . . THAT’s our new bus.”
He was pointing at what was essentially a glorified rental car shuttle that would’ve been hard-pressed to be classified as small if the other two buses were medium and large. We’d gone from a luxury bus to a passenger bus to a fuckin’ clown car. From king status to geek status to no status.
There was definitely NO way that everybody could fit into this thing and it was decided that only those who were deemed essential to Raw were allowed to board. It was like a WWE version of the Titanic lifeboats, only instead of women and children, it was top guys and mid-carders first. We were split up between the Glorified Rental Car Shuttle and another tiny van that had been drummed up to fit some of the overflow passengers. But all of the roadies and backstage crew members were left behind, along with a tag team called The Dudebusters, who as far as I know were never seen again. Last I heard, they had started their own cult in the mountains of Switzerland and had become gods.
The Glorified Rental Car Shuttle (GRCS) looked even worse on the inside than it did on the outside. There was no bathroom, no food or drinks, and the seats were like those on a school bus—cramped and thinly padded with a straight-up seat back that didn’t recline. There was no way I was going to be able to handle this for the next fifteen hours, so I texted Vince to tell him that the GRCS wasn’t good enough for the WWE crew. There wasn’t even anything to eat!
“Guess you’re gonna be hungry, then, pal. Deal with it, ha-ha!” was his reply. I flipped out and texted him the seven words that can never be printed in a book and let’s just leave it at that.
We were on our own now, so we jammed all of our bags in the back of the bus and squeezed into our seats. I sat in the first row with my shins jabbed into the steel railing in front of me. The seat was so uncomfortable that I felt I was trapped in an iron maiden (bogus) and I’m only five feet eleven. I couldn’t even imagine how bad it was for the really tall guys like Kane, Harry Smith, or Edge, who was already on the phone with Johnny asking for his release.
“I’ve had enough, this bus is terrible. I quit.”
I wasn’t ready to go that far, but I was close. If I was going to have to endure this for fifteen hours, it was time to Enter Sandman, so I put my feet up on the case of dark beer I’d grabbed from our beautiful first bus (I hate dark beer, but that’s all there was), took half an Ambien, and drifted off.
I woke up with the new day’s dawn breaking through the clouds as we approached the majestic mountains. The clock on my phone said seven A.M. and an oncoming road sign said MADRID – 1045 KM. Hmmm, that wasn’t good. We’d been driving for four hours and had only gone about 350 kilometers, which meant we still had 1,000 kilometers to go. Turns out the GRCS wasn’t much of a speed demon and was going a steady forty klicks an hour as we crawled up the inclined highway into the mountains.
I looked around the bus and saw different stages of uncomfortability: Edge was pretzeled in his chair a few rows behind me with his knees to his chin, Harry Smith was rocking back and forth in a fetal position and squishing Nattie Neidhart into the side wall, while Kane was stretched out on the floor of the bus, and Matt Hardy was dozing with his mouth pressed against the window next to R-Truth, who was the only other person awake besides me.
As the GRCS navigated its way through the windy roads of the Alps, cutting through France on its way to Spain, I noticed it was steadily slowing down. The engine was straining to get up the mountain, its transmission shuddering and hiccuping with every shift of the clutch, causing the entire chassis of the vehicle to shake. The two bus drivers began chattering incessantly in French as faint plumes of smoke emanated from under the hood.
The spare driver looked concerned as he opened the glove box and took out what I assumed was an owner’s manual. He spoke in panicked French with the driver as the two of them tried to figure out what was causing the engine to overheat. I leaned forward and asked what the problem was, but the spare driver turned to me with wild eyes and said, “NO EENGLEESH!” I wished I had paid more attention to my high school French teacher, Mr. Tonnellier, and less to Roxanne Falk’s ass.
The two of them continued babbling to each other and then got on the phone with the AAA (or I suppose the FAA in this case), as the temperature inside the GRCS creeped up to uncomfortable levels. The spare driver hung up the cell and closed the book in a huff, obviously flustered at the lack of answers he’d recieved. Then he looked at the sky, mumbling, and somberly CROSSED himself like a Catholic priest.
Truth and I looked at each other with wide eyes.
“Did you see that?!”
“Yeah, the brother just crossed hisself!!”
We turned back just as the guy reached into the glove box and took out a clear plastic bottle filled with brown liquid. He took a long pull, then passed it to the other driver, who took an even longer one. By the grimace on both of their faces, I can tell you that the brown liquid wasn’t Lipton Iced Tea, kids. We hit each other with another double take, wondering how bad things could be that the drivers we
re crossing themselves and pounding straight whiskey while at the wheel!?!
Was the GRCS going to break down in the middle of the French Alps, leaving us stranded and forcing us to become cannibals like the Donner Party? Would I have to munch on Mysterio’s calf like a drumstick, only to have Kane cane me over the head and eat my rump roast?!
In the midst of the uncertainty, Truth and I did the only thing we could do—cracked open the lukewarm dark beer and took a drink of our own.
It went down pretty harshly at first but about an hour later, that beer was tasting pretty fucking good and we were feeling a lot better about our fate even if the GRCS didn’t agree. The good news was it hadn’t slowed down any, but it was still only going somewhere between thirty and forty kilometers an hour. Angry drivers were zipping past us like we were Lloyd and Harry headed to Aspen, except at least Lloyd and Harry got to pee. We’d been driving for almost twelve hours and the dark beer was swishing around in our stomachs like water in a pail. It was a welcome sight when we finally saw a rest stop on the side of the road, for two reasons: (1) We were out of the Alps and (2) we could go for a leakski and grab something to eat. But we didn’t have much time, as we were way behind schedule. It was almost one o’clock in the afternoon and we still had 550 kilometers (345 miles) to go to make the ten forty-five P.M. deadline. I called Johnny and told him we were still so far away from Madrid that we might not make our flight on time.
“What do you mean? We have day rooms for you!”
I told him he might want to think about changing the day rooms to night rooms, and he said the rooms weren’t available at night. As a matter of fact, ALL the rooms in the city had been booked by stranded travelers (it was Cape Girardeau all over again), meaning if we didn’t make it out of Madrid by ten forty-five P.M., we’d be stranded as well.
I ran into the rest stop to drain the main vein (the all-time worst slang ever for going pee) and get something quick to eat. I settled on a little apple pie in a box, some blue gum to get rid of the horrible aftertaste of the dark beer, and a BAGUETTE. I bit into it and found out the hard way that it was more fun to say BAGUETTE than it was to actually eat a BAGUETTE. It was like chowing down on an overcooked rock. The little apple pie in a box wasn’t much better; it tasted like a little apple box in a box and left a worse aftertaste than the dark beer.
We scrambled back on the GRCS and flew down the highway at the lightspeed of seventy kilometers (forty-five miles) an hour, trying desperately to make up some of the time we’d lost in the Alps. It turned out that one of the drivers spoke Spanish, so Rey Rey could communicate with him. The driver told him we were lucky to still be moving, for the engine had almost overheated in the mountains and broken down. At that point my back was so sore from hours of being confined on the iron maiden bench, I was starting to wish we HAD broken down and cannibalized each other.
I kept Johnny in the loop about the progress we were making and he kept me in the loop about how the Raw crew was still stuck in Belfast, “stranded” in a five-star hotel surrounded by bars and restaurants. I belched up an acidic cocktail of dark beer and box pie and told him to tell the Raw crew to go fuck themselves.
He was relieved I’d been giving him constant updates, as he’d been trying in vain for hours to get ahold of Ricky Steamboat, our producer, and the guy who was supposed to be in charge of this band of gypsies. I told Ricky that the office had been trying to contact him but couldn’t get through to his phone and he said nonchalantly, “Well, that’s because I turned off my phone to save the battery in case of emergency.”
“WHAT? Well, THIS is an emergency!!!”
Steamboat took action at that point, doling out gems of advice, like telling Rey to “Speak that language the drivers understand [uh, Spanish?] and find out how much farther we have to go!” or warning us, “Guys, there will be no more stops and we probably won’t be able to check into the day rooms,” at eight thirty P.M. with seventy-five kilometers to go.
Finally, after almost twenty-four hours of travel, we saw the signs for the Madrid airport and there was no time to waste since it was already a few minutes before ten P.M. We’d have to grab our bags and run straight onto the plane or we’d be stuck in Madrid with no hotel for who knows how long. (Maybe I could sleep under another conference room table?)
The lights of the airport shone bright as we all gave a cheer of delight . . . and then drove right past it. The driver had assumed he was going to the departure terminal but took a wrong turn, and you know how the old saying goes: “To assume is to make an ASS out of U and ME . . . and I’m gonna fuckin’ rip the heads off of these jack-off drivers if I miss this flight.” Or something like that.
By the time the driver wove his way back to the main road, we’d lost another fifteen minutes and it was 10:20 P.M. when we finally pulled into the departure area of the airport. Steamboat was yelling for us to get off the bus, file into a line, and pass our luggage from person to person like they were sandbags and we were trying to save the village from a flood. To his credit, it was a pretty efficient idea and we got our bags off in minutes. Then we made a mad dash across the airport, sprinting down the concourse like a gang of jacked-up O. J. Simpsons in a ’70s Hertz commercial (dated reference). But instead of jumping over luggage carts, we were jumping over sleeping people. The floor of the airport was covered with so many bodies, it looked like the Black Death plague in 1665 London (really dated reference). Security knew we were coming and, since it was a charter flight, pretty much breezed us through customs at 10:32 P.M. They probably figured the risk of one of us blowing up the plane was worth it, as long as it cleared up space in the airport.
We darted to our gate and piled onto the plane like soldiers jumping onto a helicopter to escape Hamburger Hill in 1969. The pilot told us we didn’t have much time and to find a seat immediately, so I ran to the back of the plane and strapped myself in. Some of the crew were still stowing their bags as the door closed and we taxied over to the runway faster than any other boy has ever gone.
We booked down the tarmac screaming into flight and I felt like Indiana Jones taking off in the biplane as the Incas threw their spears. As the wheels lifted off, I looked at my phone and saw the time . . . 10:44 P.M. We’d made it by the skin of our collective chinny chin chins. I reached down between my legs, eased the seat back, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Minutes later I was wolfing down an airplane chicken breast and an airplane chunk of beef (I’d asked for both) and it was one of the best meals of my life. I asked the stewardess for a Miller Lite to wash it down, and she replied, “I’m sorry, sir, we only have DARK beer.”
I threw up in my mouth and asked for a straight vodka.
Play More Songs
In the fall of 2008, I called Rich Ward and asked him if the time was right to fire up Fozzy again. After the All That Remains tour in the winter of ’06, we’d gone our separate ways and hadn’t done anything together since. In the spring of ’08 there’d been a reissue of ATR called All That Remains, Reloaded, which included a bonus DVD of our 2005 Download Festival performance. When I watched, it reminded me how powerful a live band we were and I wondered why we’d been inactive for so long.
Fozzy had gained a lot of momentum from All That Remains, and the song “Enemy” had been our biggest hit ever, getting plays on over sixty stations across North America. But Rich and I got busy with other projects, and Fozzy ended up on hiatus.
The two of us missed playing together and decided it was time to get back to where we once belonged and write some new music. But it had been four years and our momentum had pretty much ground to a halt. All we had going for us at that point were a few good records under our belt and our fans’ loyalty, but other than that, we were starting pretty much from scratch.
Rich and I believed we had the chemistry and the X factor (I ain’t talking about Blaze Bayley) to be something special. After a long talk, we decided we were up for the ch
allenge of taking Fozzy to the next level, but there would have to be a few changes made to the way we approached the band. If we were going to do it, we were going to do it all the way.
We decided there would be no more part-time efforts, no more half-assing, no more taking the band lightly. It was time to go hard or go home, so we made a new set of Fozzy fundamentals.
First off, Fozzy would now be our number one priority. That wasn’t too hard a commitment for me to make as I was approaching forty and contemplating life after wrestling. I’d been playing in bands since I was twelve years old, and my two goals as a kid were to be a wrestler and to be in a band, and I was lucky enough to be doing both. My drive to get to the next level with Fozzy was immeasurable, and after climbing to the top of the wrestling world, I knew I could do it again in rock ’n’ roll—but only if I approached it with total dedication.
Second, we needed a serious image makeover. Just take a look at our video for “Enemy” if you want evidence of our previous fashion faux pas. I was wearing gray cords (seriously, cords?) and a frumpy black long-sleeve shirt; Rich wore a cowboy hat; drummer Frank Fontsere wore camo pants with an orange shirt and a toque (“I’ve got an amazing outfit for the video,” he had boasted proudly a few days before); and bassist Sean Delson wore a stitched Western long-sleeve and baggy Levi’s with a wristwatch.
We looked bush-league terrible, which really surprises me in retrospect. I’d always been very conscious of my image in wrestling and in the early days of Fozzy, so I don’t know why I allowed us to go grunge with All That Remains. Maybe we had focused so much on the “gimmick” of Fozzy in the early days of the band that we felt we needed to binge and purge ourselves of any type of style or fashion for a while? Whatever the reason, it was a bad decision, as people listen to music with their eyes as well as their ears, and if we were sounding like Black Sabbath and looking like Revenge of the Nerds, we weren’t going to get far. But those days were done and we were ready for an extreme rock ’n’ roll makeover.
The Best in the World Page 22
